Tag: frameworks

I’ve posted slides from my pre­sen­ta­tion at Strata to slideshare; they’re avail­able for both view­ing and down­load. I shared quite a bit of new mate­r­ial with the audi­ence at Strata: most notably a new col­lec­tion of mode chains and exam­ple sce­nar­ios cap­tur­ing pat­terns in dis­cov­ery activ­ity in the con­sumer domain, to com­ple­ment our under­stand­ing of and descrip­tive pat­terns for enterprise-centered sense making.

O’Reilly recorded the talk, so I’ll post the video as soon as they make it available.

Big data types, visu­al­iza­tion wonks, ana­lyt­i­cal savants, and all those inter­ested in the dis­cov­ery space as the lead­ing cat­e­gory of inter­ac­tion in the Age Of Insight should join me in NY next week for Strata. I’m super excited to be shar­ing the Lan­guage of Dis­cov­ery: A Toolkit For Design­ing Big Data Expe­ri­ences at this East Coast edi­tion of Strata. If travel and time allow, I’m going to take in some of the NYC Data Week events sched­uled for the same week.

Slides and video will be avail­able after the con­fer­ence, but there’s no sub­sti­tute for being there. And besides, New York is beau­ti­ful in Octo­ber, so what more rea­son do you need to join?

I’ve posted the slides from my UXLX talk on the Lan­guage of Dis­cov­ery. Thanks to a few days spent fea­tured on the slideshare home­page, they’ve clocked over 60,000 views in the past week! In com­bi­na­tion with the buzz from the audi­ence for the talk, I think this shows there is broader aware­ness and appetite for answers to the ques­tion of how design­ers will make big data acces­si­ble and ‘engageable’.

From the prac­ti­cal per­spec­tive, if you’re look­ing for a way to describe dis­cov­ery and sense mak­ing needs and activ­i­ties, there’s no bet­ter resource than this. And the LOD is well-grounded from the method­olog­i­cal and research per­spec­tives, hav­ing roots in HCIR, cog­ni­tive sci­ence, and a num­ber of other aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines that con­tribute to the toolkit for under­stand­ing human inter­ac­tion with infor­ma­tion and dis­cov­ery activity.

I hope the lan­guage of dis­cov­ery is part of that big­ger pic­ture of how cre­ators of inter­ac­tions and defin­ers of expe­ri­ences shape the new tools peo­ple use in the Age of Insight.

I’ve just con­firmed that I’ll be pre­sent­ing a light­ning talk at this year’s UX Lis­bon, in May — I’m excited! There’s a great lineup of UX speak­ers, and I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up with the inter­na­tional UX com­mu­nity for the first time since mov­ing back to the U.S.

I’m shar­ing some of the work I’ve been doing at Endeca / Ora­cle, around the ques­tion of inter­ac­tion and sense mak­ing for the emerg­ing cat­e­gory of big data. This is a UX ques­tion I don’t think is on the radar of many prac­ti­tion­ers. And for those who are encoun­ter­ing it, the fram­ings I see for how to engage with this from the UX per­spec­tive are scat­tered and — frankly — small. They tend to focus on the specifics of visu­al­iza­tion, and miss the larger pic­ture of how peo­ple engage in dis­cov­ery tasks and activ­i­ties every day, on small and large scales. If you’ve fol­lowed my work on other emerg­ing inter­ac­tion UX and inter­ac­tion spaces like enter­prise appli­ca­tions, games, mobile, social net­works, and — before I returned to my roots in mak­ing prod­ucts in a startup con­text — aug­mented real­ity, it’s easy to see I’m inter­ested in the deep struc­ture of new inter­ac­tion spaces, and I think a forward-looking per­spec­tive on the broad and fun­da­men­tal con­cep­tual frame of ref­er­ence for such new spaces is essen­tial for any­one who intends to work in them in a seri­ous and impact­ful fash­ion. So con­sider this talk an intro­duc­tion to the pack­age of ideas about tech­nol­ogy, inter­ac­tion, prod­ucts, and their dis­cov­ery aspects that I refer to as of the “Age of Insight” — the era in which every­one dis­cov­ers, and every­thing is discoverable.

I hope to see a good mix of famil­iar and new faces at this grow­ing event. Thanks to the orga­niz­ers for includ­ing me in the program!

The Lan­guage of Dis­cov­ery: A Gram­mar for Design­ing Big Data Interactions

The oncom­ing tidal wave of Big Data, with its rapidly evolv­ing ecosys­tem of multi-channel infor­ma­tion sat­u­rated envi­ron­ments and ser­vices, brings pro­found chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties for the design of effec­tive user experiences.

Look­ing deeper than the cel­e­bra­tory rhetoric of infor­ma­tion quan­tity, at its core, Big Data makes pos­si­ble unprece­dented aware­ness and insight into every sphere of life; from busi­ness and pol­i­tics, to the envi­ron­ment, arts and soci­ety. In this com­ing Age of Insight, ‘dis­cov­ery’ is not only the purview of spe­cial­ized Data Sci­en­tists who cre­ate exotic visu­al­iza­tions of mas­sive data sets, it is a fun­da­men­tal cat­e­gory of human activ­ity that is essen­tial to every­day inter­ac­tions between peo­ple, resources, and environments.

To pro­vide archi­tects and design­ers with an effec­tive start­ing point for cre­at­ing sat­is­fy­ing and rel­e­vant user expe­ri­ences that rely on dis­cov­ery inter­ac­tions, this ses­sion presents a sim­ple ana­lyt­i­cal and gen­er­a­tive toolkit for under­stand­ing how peo­ple con­duct the broad range of dis­cov­ery activ­i­ties nec­es­sary in the information-permeated world.

Clas­sic IR (infor­ma­tion retrieval) is pred­i­cated on the notion of users search­ing for infor­ma­tion in order to sat­isfy a par­tic­u­lar “infor­ma­tion need”. How­ever, it is now accepted that much of what we rec­og­nize as search behav­iour is often not infor­ma­tional per se. For exam­ple, Broder (2002) has shown that the need under­ly­ing a given web search could in fact be nav­i­ga­tional (e.g. to find a par­tic­u­lar site or known item) or trans­ac­tional (e.g. to find a sites through which the user can trans­act, e.g. through online shop­ping, social media, etc.). Sim­i­larly, Rose & Levin­son (2004) have iden­ti­fied con­sump­tion of online resources as a fur­ther cat­e­gory of search behav­iour and query intent.

In this paper, we extend this work to the enter­prise con­text, exam­in­ing the needs and behav­iours of indi­vid­u­als across a range of search and dis­cov­ery sce­nar­ios within var­i­ous types of enter­prise. We present an ini­tial tax­on­omy of “dis­cov­ery modes”, and dis­cuss some ini­tial impli­ca­tions for the design of more effec­tive search and dis­cov­ery plat­forms and tools.

There’s a con­sid­er­able amount of research avail­able on infor­ma­tion retrieval — even within a com­par­a­tively new dis­ci­pline like HCIR, focused on the human to sys­tem inter­ac­tion aspects of IR — but I think it’s the attempt to define an activ­ity cen­tered gram­mar for inter­act­ing with infor­ma­tion that makes our approach worth exam­in­ing. The HCIR events in the U.S. (and now Europe) blend aca­d­e­mic and prac­ti­tioner per­spec­tives, so are an appro­pri­ate audi­ence for our pro­posed vocab­u­lary of dis­cov­ery activ­ity ‘modes’ that’s based on a sub­stan­tial body of data col­lected and ana­lyzed dur­ing solu­tion design and deploy­ment engagements.

I’m post­ing slides for my ‘Under­stand­ing Frame­works’ por­tion of the Beyond Find­abil­ity work­shop on strate­gic prac­tices just given at the 2010 IA Sum­mit. This por­tion of the full-day pro­gram empha­sizes under­stand­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing the com­mon things that make up a design frame­work, con­cen­trat­ing on the sim­ple struc­ture that design­ers need to grasp in order to cre­ate their own effec­tive frame­works for solv­ing design chal­lenges. I hope you find it infor­ma­tive and useful!

Design frame­works offer sub­stan­tial ben­e­fits to all par­ties involved in cre­at­ing high qual­ity user expe­ri­ences for prod­ucts, ser­vices, dig­i­tal media, and the emerg­ing inter­ac­tion spaces of aug­mented real­ity, ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing, and cross-media sto­ry­telling. Frame­works allow design­ers to bet­ter adapt to the rapid shifts in the dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment by lever­ag­ing increas­ing mod­u­lar­ity, gran­u­lar­ity, and struc­ture, and accom­mo­dat­ing the far-reaching changes inher­ent in the rise of co-creative dynam­ics. This pre­sen­ta­tion — part of a full-day work­shop deliv­ered at the 2009 & 2010 Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture Sum­mits — iden­ti­fies the ele­ments com­mon to all design frame­works, and offers best prac­tices on effec­tively putting frame­works into imme­di­ate use. Alto­gether, it is a short course in the cre­ation and use of cus­tomized design frame­works for address­ing the com­plex­ity of strate­gic expe­ri­ence design.

“Beyond Find­abil­ity: IA Prac­tice & Strat­egy for the New Web” the full-day work­shop that debuted at the 2009 IA Sum­mit, is back for 2010. Fea­tur­ing an expanded lineup that includes Andrew Hin­ton, Matthew Milan, Chris­t­ian Crum­lish, Erin Mal­one, Cindy Chas­tain, and me, the work­shop explores lead­ing edge the­ory and prac­tice to equip expe­ri­ence archi­tects for the chal­lenges of design­ing social expe­ri­ences, the DIY Inter­net, engag­ing busi­ness strate­gi­cally, and more.

Bonus: All work­shop atten­dees will receive a free copy of Social Mania — the social pat­terns design card game unveiled at IDEA09.

Last year’s ren­di­tion was pos­i­tively invig­o­rat­ing, with par­tic­i­pants from experience-based busi­nesses like Zap­pos, and prac­ti­tion­ers from lead­ing firms like Adap­tive Path. But this one goes to eleven: we hope you’ll join us!